Exercise and fitness have become increasingly popular and the benefits from such activities are well known. Various types of technology have been incorporated into fitness and other athletic activities. For example, a wide variety of portable electronic devices are available for use in fitness activities, such as MP3 or other audio players, radios, portable televisions, DVD players, or other video playing devices, watches, GPS systems, pedometers, mobile telephones, pagers, beepers, etc. Many fitness enthusiasts or athletes use one or more of these devices when exercising or training to keep them entertained, provide athletic performance data, to keep them in contact with others, etc.
Advances in technology have also provided more sophisticated athletic performance monitoring systems. Athletic performance monitoring systems enable easy and convenient monitoring of many physical or physiological characteristics associated with exercise and fitness activity, or other athletic performances including, for example, speed and distance data, altitude data, GPS data, heart rate, pulse rate, blood pressure data, body temperature, etc. This data can be provided to a user through a portable electronic device carried by the user. For example, one athletic performance monitoring system may incorporate a wrist worn device that may also communicate with other devices such as an audio player and/or a heart rate monitor worn by the user. While athletic performance monitoring systems according to the prior art provide a number of advantageous features, they nevertheless have certain limitations. For example, prior athletic performance monitoring systems have not utilized heart rate information in a manner that provides more useful analysis to the user. Aspects of the present disclosure seek to overcome certain of these limitations and other drawbacks of the prior art, and to provide new features not heretofore available. Heart rate may be used to monitor and compare athletic activities since heart rate is generally considered one of the more accurate ways to evaluate amount of calories burned and amount of activity performed.
A full discussion of the features and advantages of the present invention is deferred to the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.